A Poetic Account, “Flowering of a new generation out of black dirt.”

“Warwick in History” – Dorothea D. and Fred Everett had this to say about the Black Acres in November 1941:

Only 50 miles from New York City a band of immigrants is pioneering America much as our forefathers did. Most of these immigrants are Polish.

About 1880 a few recent arrivals from Poland were brought upstate from New York City to help on the farms around the towns of Florida and Pine Island. They had been stifled by the unfamiliar life of the big city. When first they saw the black acres of Orange County muck lands stretching out before them like the beloved soil of their native Poland, they fell on their knees, crying for joy, and kissed the dirt.

These people have literally been on their knees ever since, raising onions and other crops. Their story is a saga of dismal swamps and lowly folk, of the sweat and toil of a courageous people fighting odds, of the growth and flowering of a new generation out of black dirt.